Paranoia demons

Being on night-shifts is hard. I work the eight or so (actually it has become more "so" as we keep getting extra hours) hours from 1am to 9am and then we go to breakfast/lunch at Denny's and return around noon. Then I read a while and try to sleep around one or two. Of course, as it is daylight and the cleaners don't understand what "Do Not Disturb" means (maybe in the Kanji it means "come and wake me up now"?), I don't fall asleep for some time. I then have to get up around 7 for dinner and then at 9 we return and I get another couple of hours sleep before shift.

Yesterday I must have fallen asleep around three or four only to wake up sometime gone five with fear. I felt incredibly paranoid and scared to go back to sleep. But I didn't know why. I tried to sleep for the next couple of hours but failed. Later that evening, in the pub- "Corkheads"- Leo said "Did anyone feel that earthquake earlier?". I realised that that must have been what woke me up. His comment triggered some memory of the earth slipping from beneath my feet. Apparently the NanoBPM group were having a meeting at the time and Steve Smith was the only one to have felt it. How strange that only he noticed the quake and yet it was strong enough to wake me up and give me paranoid thoughts.

Anyway, so I couldn't sleep and then went out, spent a fortune on a taxi back when I was too tired to socialise any more, bathed and slept. And now I am on Japanese time. Oops. Night shifts will start again on Monday. Ah well.

edit: http://neic.usgs.gov/neis/bulletin/neic_ypai.html
Earthquake was magnitude 5.

Japan

So I am Japan yet again. It isn't all bad... at least I like the people here. Anyway, here's part of an email I sent to Sus.


I am feeling more like myself today. I woke at the gorgeously late hour of 8am. That is usually the hour I sleep on to at the weekends, lazy arse I am. I then put on the yukata provided by the dorm which was less of a thrill than it was in my last visit probably because I have a yukata at home now and so it has no novelty value... I made myself some tea (sans milk alas but in a tiny teapot and china cup without a handle) and ate some chocolate coated cornflakes, a banana flavour filled chocolate cake and a banana. I read about 50 pages of my book which felt so good.... I have very recently got back into reading. Last Thursday on the random day off I went visiting nearby "cities" and ended up reading on train platforms a lot which ate up a lot of pages. And then the flight was dull- I have been so spoilt by Virgin. Virgin has entertainment light years beyond United. I couldn't believe that on a ten hour flight we didn't have personal tvs. We had to watch a screen at the front of the... area? You know what I mean... I hope. It was awful... there was a lot of dull tv about... business and technology. I guess it could have been interesting but it was hopelessly out of date. I think one of the shows was from '98. Anyway. There were also three films, one of which I had seen before and couldn't face watching again (Finding Neverland) which was better than a poke in the eye with a sma cable but the screen flickered constantly and there was a high pitched ring in the audio. Plus the picture and sound kept on being lost. I just don't understand why the technology on this flight was worse than any I have seen. The first long flight (as in flight that can actually fit one feature length presentation in the time between take off and landing) I did was in '99 and we had personal screens and about 8 films to choose from although we had to start watching the film at a certain time and it ran continuously- like going to a cinema and having 8 screens to choose from. Now of course we get personal screens and the ability to pause, rewind etc as if we had a dvd player with a selection of 100 dvds and 100 albums to choose from.

So the flight was awful.

Point is, I ended up reading a lot which I didn't know I could do as previously reading on planes had made me ill. I guess it is a mood thing- sometimes I find that I can read graphic novels on trains and sometimes I find that even those make me sick. So I read a lot on the plane and that seems to have kick started my urge to read and write huge rambling paragraphs in emails.

Am I boring you? What else is new...?

I was talking about my morning. But I think that is it. It is 10am now.

Yesterday was indeed busy so I didn't have time for a lengthy email. We had a hell of a bad day. There was a meeting at 1:30 that Steve (aka Gingerbeard though he doesn't have one... Rian's naming strikes again.... also aka teammate/colleague/officemate/PhD thesis riding on this May-June run guy) had to prepare a talk for so that was the morning and half the afternoon wasted. The Oxford electronics guru somehow managed to come all the way here without radiation training and has been denied access to the tunnel so he couldn't come in and set up his part of the experiment. So a couple of other colleagues had to put his electronics together but they were pathetic at it and Steve had to do a lot. And the measurements that our supervisor made of the dimensions of the working space turned out to be totally off and our cables are all too long which gives us an unnecessary latency problem. Steve is convinced that he's going to get in trouble for this when the sup arrives (because the boss is never wrong, right?). What else... oh, other things went wrong. So not great. And tonight is our first shift (1am to 9am) and my little routine is going to be tested and I am worried... it's just not going to work. Gah.